skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Most viable hydro sites are gone, yes. But you don't need a viable hydro site for pumped hydro. What you need is water at the bottom of a hill. That's common.
Hmmm - changing reality to conform with artificial software limits is not a great idea.
Pasting my reply to someone else rather than rewrite the same thinking:

I agree it's not consistent, but who ever accused English of being that?!
My point isn't that all business names are treated that way, just that the ones that are the reason is grammatical tradition not (for the most part) people who incorrectly think the shop is called "Tesco's" or whatever.

(But as others have replied to you, it's also more common than just Tesco, definitely including "Costa's" for lots of people.)
The “fatal flaw” of skipping maintenance to max out value-add work seems like it could be addressed by ensuring that any accumulated tech debt be properly accounted for, rather than swept under the carpet.

You’d consider “productivity” then to be value-add work minus identified tech debt. Since calling out tech debt would hurt leadership’s own metrics, you’d need a mechanism to allow individual engineers to blamelessly (and probably anonymously) report, validate, and attach a cost metric to this tech debt.

The org would then be incentivized to balance work that delivers immediate value with work that represents an investment in making the team more efficient and effective at delivering that value in the long run.
HN is crypto-skeptic, not the right forum to promote this on
Also, the Crimson, which would probably have little reason to be biased in this.

https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2021/7/7/fryer-returns-fr...
From personal experience, I can attest that it is horrible. Ugly, ugly, ugly.
This type of conflation is extremely dangerous. Criticism of the actions of the government of Israel is not the same thing as anti-semitism (a real and very bad thing).

To make this claim essentially gives the government of Israel the go ahead to do absolutely anything without any possibility of criticism, because that criticism is never engaged with on the basis of its content but dismissed as anti-semitism.
Stephen Wolfram has a great post on this: https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2023/02/what-is-chatgpt-...

It's really long! But worth the read.
Might this be a hamfisted reaction to timing attacks?
No it isn't. They said UIs are different in different cultures because "red implies prosperity and vitality" so prove it.

Show me some examples and evidence. Anyone can make claims based off of cliches, but when it comes time to back it up with real world examples everyone either goes silent or gets upset and makes the same claim more aggressively.

Chinese historical art has a use of red due to cinnabar being believed to be healthy and that persists in a few areas like red envelopes, but 'red means prosperity in some cultures' doesn't mean their computer interfaces are different. Their stop lights are the same too.

https://soft4europe-france.com/documentation2018/11-40/EN/do...
I really like this article so I am sad to be cynical about it. Nevertheless. If you're engaging in C-suite politics as described in this article, what on earth would be the motivation for writing all this in public? I doubt the situation will evolve favourably to Mr Shore if the leadership team starts reading this.

Full agreement with the perspective though. CEOs (& consultant friends) generally have some extremely reasonable expectations about software engineer productivity based on experiences in manufacturing, primary industries, healthcare, service and public sectors. Surely we need accountability and productivity metrics! It is a long and painful process that may never end watching them gathering the evidence needed to learn that software engineer productivity is different. A sad history repeating over and over again like clockwork.

This CTO seems to be finding a golden path for how to manage expectations without beating that over people's heads and I'm taking notes. I don't think it'll work out exactly the way he hopes but I love the attempt at making his team productive.
People don't actually want this. We sell ourselves on the Jetsons-like idea of automating away our daily tasks so we can just live our lives, but that scares us.

Most people don't actually seem to want to have mist most of their waking hours free to do whatever they want.
I know Theo. He’s a good person who wants to educate folks, and make things simpler.

There are problems with education: you often have to make things contrived to show problems as fast as possible, and it’s hard to convey all of the nuance. Theo, and others, definitely try to strike that balance and I think it’s fair to say that this is because of how the front end world works rather than because of personalities.
There are plenty of LLMs that aren't MoE/ensemble, and there are also plenty of LLMs that are pure completion models, that haven't been fine-tuned/RLHF'd to be conversational. I would recommend you read up a bit more on how modern LLMs work, I get the feeling your intuition on that could improve.

edit: I can't reply to the child comment as we've reached the thread limit, but I can say that LLMs are not trained on a tiny subset of data, they are trained on as much data as possible. A LLM becomes converational/instruct due to fine tuning it with reinforcement learning data. GPT-3.5 is by all accounts not an ensemble model, Llama2/3 is NOT an ensemble model/MoE, yet will allow you to do in-context learning/few shot prompting effortlessly. As said, I think your intuition on how these LLMs work and (as far as we know) how they work, needs readjustment.
Depends on how many new U(U/L)IDs you insert, but when it's part of an index anyway then I personally would, as the performance penalty would be small (much smaller than anything else you do).
I've wondered how well the inject-pump style works! Do you have experiences to relate? All the electronics are up top where you can get at them. Has the mechanism at the bottom ever needed to be serviced? Can it be retrieved easily?
Honestly, a good PR should have a very clear description of the idea and a sample implementation, and then a trusted core contributor re-implements the fix on his own. But Github users are entitled and spoiled by Github-marketed commercial software, so they will rage at this.
Anduril Announces Pulsar Family of AI-Enabled Electromagnetic Warfare Systems
This article is trying hard to sound like it is based on years of learnings, but honestly every point in here just reads like it was cobbled together after the xz incident.
It is a mistake, it should be x.y = ((x + y)^2 - (x - y)^2)/4.
No, they mention that they work closely with the OpenBSD team, which maintains an explicit fork ("xenocara") that maintains the NetBSD ABI. It was OpenBSD that added wsdiplay and wsinput, which are frankly better in a lot of use cases than Wayland.
Post mentions this Apple doc, https://developer.apple.com/documentation/kernel/1462446-mac..., which states it can potentially be used to fingerprint a device?

How can this API be used to fingerprint devices? It’s just getting the current time.

My best guess, you can infer a users time zone? Thus get a very general/broad area of where this user lives (USA vs EU; or US-EST vs US-PST)

Maybe I should just set my time to UTC on all devices
Looks like facebook's ToS,

we may need your data for some unspecified purpose ("AI model training") that we can't even dream of right now, so we'll just take all the rights
It's pretty cool to see how people use Notion for websites. Makes it so much easier to manage the site.
that would require assuming everyone is race blind. That isnt the case and we should stop pretending it is.

And people still find ways to infer race.
Same question. What did I just install that required a restart?
Er. In the article? I wrote it, I posted it. Click the link and all is revealed.
SAP, Salesforce and Workday came straight from the devil himself.
Just for fun. What is the shortest micropython server for ON/OFF-type socket? Have not tested this yet:

import network,socket,time

sta_if = network.WLAN(network.STA_IF)
if not sta_if.isconnected():
sta_if.active(True)
sta_if.connect('wifi', 'password')
while not sta_if.isconnected(): pass

from machine import Pin

relayON =Pin(5, Pin.OUT)

s = socket.socket(socket.AF_INET, socket.SOCK_STREAM)
s.bind(('', 80))
s.listen(5)

while True:
s.settimeout(0.5)
try:
conn, addr = s.accept()
request = conn.recv(1024)
request = str(request)
if request.find('/ON') == 6:
relayON.value(1)
if request.find('/OFF') == 6:
relayON.value(0)
conn.close()
except: pass
Tools That I Fucking Hate Which I Never Thought I Would Use, Abuse, or Have To Learn:

-Jira

-Workday

-SAP

-Excel

Corporate hell :'(
> If you're declaring an object on the stack, then there is no reason to be using a pointer to refer to it.

Why not? What if you have some function f(T *) that you want to call?

But anyway, we're not _just_ talking about stack allocations, but also extra levels of indirection on the heap. For example, vectors store their elements in a heap-allocated buffer directly. If they kept them all in shared pointers, there would be an extra level of indirection. This means e.g. vector::operator[] has to return a reference (which is basically the same thing as a pointer under the hood); it can't return shared_ptr or similar (because storing all its elements as shared pointers would make it way slower due to the extra allocations).

In Rust, vector access is safe (due to the borrow checker), but in C++, it's not.

vector<int> v {1, 2, 3};
int& x = v[0];
v.push_back(4);
printf("%d\n");

This code is UB in C++. In Rust, it's impossible to write something like this.

fn main() {
let mut v = vec![1, 2, 3];
let x = &v[0];
v.push(4);
println!("{x}");
}

This code fails to compile.
Space is a big issue, to subject the person's whole body to the force in the same direction you'd need it to be at least 2x larger around than the tallest person you're going to send through it which AFAIK isn't possible anywhere on the ISS at the moment. BEAM may have had just enough space before it was converted to a cargo module.
> The answer, to use a term that any client of Workday could surely use, is POSIWID. This is a saying in systems thinking: The purpose of a system is what it does (POSIWID), not what it fails to do. And the reality is that what Workday — and its many despised competitors — does for organizations is far more important than the anguish it causes everyone else.

That’s the part that baffles me. There’s less crappy HR software out there, I’ve been in companies that use better software, but still workday seems like the default choice?

The only explanation that comes to mind is that the people that buy workday don’t use it.

There’s a similar issue with LMS and educational software. I’ve talked with a few teachers and professors and it’s usually common that they hate __ LMS (I’ve talked with some that love another) but teachers, except in rare cases, are not the ones that make software purchases decisions for their schools or districts.

So if that’s the case all the workday needs to do to keep selling tons is to make pretty reports and tell executives how much money they can save by using their software instead of some more “hip” solution out there.
[dupe]

More discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40271104
The wife still needed to eat and get cloth. That one person needed to feed her. Also, female employment was 28% not 0 in 1940.
I actually really liked Windows Phone, but it's obvious why it didn't take off - iPhone captured all of the "sheep" consumers (the ones that just want what everyone else has) successfully (and still owns them somehow), and Android captured all the rest (which tend to be smaller target groups). The largest target was probably price point, but cheap androids sucked so much, it just created more Apple users.

By the time WP came around, this was already been done. Phones were costing near a $1000 and a 2 year contract, and opinions have been made. No real amount of people was going to risk a windows phone when you'd have to fork over that much money and that much of a contract term.
Thanks to HN for allowing us have this sort of conversations, talking is much needed!
That is very nice. I've been looking for something like this. It's useful in the case where you want to do a tutorial with an application that produces sound, but you want to talk at the same time. The best solution before would be to plug a 3.5mm cable into an audio interface that accepts this sort of input, and then record at the same time. The problem is that then you cannot do small cuts in real-time as easily as if you are recording directly into a DAW with audacity, and plus it gives you the possibility of using real-time effects with your DAW.

Good for streaming also, without needing to use OBS, which is hit and miss when it comes to some things.
The compressor/turbine part will have predictable wear rates, not substantially different from what you see in fossil plants.

The reservoirs will at some point see noticeable sediment buildup, but not at all comparable with surface pumped hydro based on blocking valleys, due to the cyclic nature of the water flow in the hydrostor facility. And occasional cleanout (measured in decades or centuries?) will be trivially cheap compared to construction cost. Very much unlike cleanout cost behind valley dams, which are would-be cleanout costs because that never ever happens as it would utterly dwarf the cost of the original dam. There's been an article linked here a few months ago (can't find it, unfortunately) about how the total capacity of pumped hydro is getting increasingly smaller each year, despite new sites getting built. This is because sedimentation already outpaces the buildup, and it will only get worse the more we build. The volumes accumulating behind a dam are just too big, unless you have zero natural flow from rainwater (and then just getting the working volume of water to the site would be prohibitively expensive, per capacity, even before you factor in evaporation - the cycle capacity per unit of water is just so much lower than what a hydrostor site would achieve with its much larger head plus the energy stored in air compressionand heat)
I do think so as well. "But what would I do with all this time?"... I find this so sad.
Dammit, you made me spit my coffee out of laughter!
I agree swores. Your comment did say 'traditional' and my comment was facetious.

There's been an historical transition from small chains owned by individuals (e.g. the Victorian Mr John Sainsbury) to big brands (e.g. Superdrug), hasn't there.

The possessive apostrophe was appropriate for the former but surely less so nowadays. I would guess "Sainsbury's" was a rebrand intended to reflect tradition.
Seems like the author of this is aware of Goodhart's law, but it bears repeating: both of the proposed real measures (RoI and value-add capacity) could come at the expense of uptime and stability. John Doerr talks about balancing OKRs, so you could have you product bets and...something about stability: hitting SLAs, whatever.

And the term "product bets" makes the leadership team sound like Mortimer and Randolph Duke.
Oh I thought this was going to be along the lines of Michael Dell's assertion. He said ever time Dell doubled in size, he needed to revisit all the processes. Automate things that used to be manageable by hand. Customize processes that used to be one-size-fits-all. Because a bigger company has different optimal solution points for nearly everything.

(Which could be taken to heart by people insisting that government should go back to some imagined simpler past. Those old processes are obsolete; there's no going back. But that's another tale.)
The Rustonomicon is a good start, on fat pointers: https://doc.rust-lang.org/nomicon/exotic-sizes.html

> Because they lack a statically known size, these types can only exist behind a pointer. Any pointer to a DST consequently becomes a wide pointer consisting of the pointer and the information that "completes" them (more on this below).
I had cause to walk through Bristol centre the other evening (going to see Orbital play) and was shocked at how bad the cycle lanes are there. There's a big pedestrianised area with cycle lanes going through it, but the lanes just have a slightly different paving and the occasional bicycle symbol. As a pedestrian (I'd usually be a cyclist), it was tough to figure out where the bike lanes were and unless you deliberately looked for them, you wouldn't know. That's definitely one area where different colours are required. Not even paint.

To make it worse, there's lots of places where pedestrians and cyclists would inevitably cross paths to get to the traffic lights and of course there's no indication of where people should cross the cycle lanes.

Unfortunately, Google streetview is too old for me to provide an illustration of how bad it is.
To be fair, they were buying those in 1940 too.
What about the Bayesian methods shown in "How to Measure Anything"? They have been applied to Cybersecurity ("How to Measure Anything in Cybersecurity Risk" in a very thorough and convincing manner. It looks like the business around it is trying to apply it to product management (https://hubbardresearch.com/shop/measure-anything-project-ma...). Basically the idea is when things are hard to measure we should not abandon quantitative scales and use qualitative ones (like t-shirt sizes) but instead use probabilities to quantify our uncertainty and leverage techniques like bayesian updates, confidence intervals, and monte carlo simulations.
Thank you. The best thing I've read this year, easily.

However, halfway the post instead of going all metaphysical and try to create a garden, isn't the logical conclusion that individual gains in the rat race trump any grand plan you might have? Is it about the balance between being the best rat and finding a community to create a garden? If you garden by yourself, isn't that just being a rat with extra steps?
Apple just doesn't backport APIs, it's a very very very rare occurence when it happens.
It was introduced last year alongside iOS 16 so you require the latest OS, it's the norm really.
We have to use Workday and everyone hates it with a passion. What baffles me is how disjoint it is. It's like the user interface was designed by several teams that were competing with each other. There's simply no rhyme or reason behind where things are. If you navigate away from something then good luck finding it again (you might though, find the same information presented in a different way in some other part of the UI). The forms and controls are like something from My First Website that you wrote in 1999. Since everyone in the company (including senior management) have to use it, I don't understand who signed off on it unless they left the company right afterwards.
Discord has a branch here in Europe “Discord Netherlands B.V.”
Bingo.

When I write some 100% bespoke code that is rather hastily composed and then paste it all into ChatGPT4 asking it to "refactor this code with a focus on testability and maintainability" and not only does it do so, but it does a pretty damn good job about it, it feels rather reductive to say "it's just providing the next most likely word".

I mean, maybe that's how it works, but that statistical output clearly involves modeling what my code does and what I want it to do. Rather than make me think LLMs are a cheap trick, it just has me thinking, "shit - maybe that's all I do too."
Not sure about Google, but Meta has tons of C++ code because it was written before Rust became a viable alternative. And of course, rewriting those millions of lines of code would be too expensive now.

But Rust now has a large amount of mindshare there and is being used a lot in new projects.
Genuine question, what does it mean to be a trained practitioner in statistics, AI, physics and other areas?
I genuinely feel troubled by how accurate this is.

When the little startup I was at got acquired by a megacorp we had to migrate a lot of tooling. It shocked me how different some of the software is in a philosophical sense. When you only have fifty people it's hard not to think about the plight of your code monkeys, even when you're getting schmoozed by a sales rep.

Once you manage to put a couple of elevator rides and a secretary between the decision maker and the work-doer you can go full principal-agent and really take a big old dump into the air con in the programmers' sub-basement.
The same way that you can do it from javascript I'd imagine.

Timezones and such are one data point but the skews and accuracy and such are able to help you differentiate users too.

https://forums.whonix.org/t/javascript-time-fingerprinting/7...
What's the utility of having a 128-bit pointer on a 64-bit system ?
Yeah, I was definitely thinking of typical American-style neighborhood street design. My family is Scottish, and I visit every few years, so I'm familiar with hour smaller towns are often laid out (similar to what your link depicts).

I'm guessing streets like the one you share are narrow enough that cars don't usually try going 50mph? And as noted, there is a fair bit of thought given - bollards at the intersection and school, etc.

Here's the street I was talking about...
https://www.google.com/maps/@38.9397759,-77.353558,3a,75y,12...

Houses don't directly front this road, but there are intersections with housing clusters every 1/4 mile or so, with cars and pedestrians crossing at uncontrolled intersections. Additionally, the bike lanes end before the school complex, then start again, then end before the shopping strip. Presumably to leave space for more turning lanes. But, really kills the purpose of the bike lanes since they don't go to the two places you'd want to visit!

And another...
https://www.google.com/maps/@38.928914,-77.3522244,3a,75y,15...

Sidewalk on one side, so anybody living on the south has to cross a wide road. Unmarked parking on both sides. Bike lanes come and go (usually turning in "sharrows"). If I were king, I'd remove the "free" curb-side parking and put in proper protected bike lanes.
Virtual microphone driver, perhaps?
Thanks for the explanation. This is definitely something I hadn't considered.
Look up the history of how Stanley Morison and Victor Lardent created Times New Roman for _The Times_.

The connection you are looking for is covered by Fra. Edward Catich in his books, and carried forward digitally in Carol Twombly's Trajan.
Did you try just seeing Plan 9 GUIs? They do more than what you ask and better, you do not need to "pull out toolbars", you simply create them typing functions names in a relevant place. Try Pharo and you'll see and even powerful model, the UI is just an element to makes the text active and user-programmable for anyone.

If you think about them you'll realize why the widget GUI model can't be an answer, it try to offer "some" flexibility, but can't be enough, trying to avoid the need of an acculturated user, well, the acculturate user is not an issue, it's a target. We MUST form them, because IT is the nervous system of our society. We should stop making Ford model workers as a kind of dumb-terminal meat-based robots, we must craft people, humans who bend their desktops to their needs.

You can't create anything like that up front, you need empowered end users. The current old mac model is rubbish today since we are in the era of WebApps, and we are there because we need DocUIs, and the current WebUIs are not flexible enough on the user side, and that's why we start again NotebookUI and alike, modern 2D CLIs, trying to deny we need end user programming while we slowly push it again. Old Mac like modern Gnome SHell want just to be at the center for narcissistic business purposes.
Cost centers attract bad software, because buyers always prioritize "most checkboxes for lowest price" and ignore UX.

Put another way, how many HR departments do you know that have a continual process improvement of their employee productivity?

So why would vendors ever optimize UX?